


Afloat

by standalone



Series: Fucking Political Bullshit exR Coffeeshop AU [2]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: 2016 US Presidential Election, Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Politics, Alternate Universe - Race Changes, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-20
Updated: 2016-12-20
Packaged: 2018-09-10 14:07:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8920114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/standalone/pseuds/standalone
Summary: The bullshit continues; Enjolras gets a delivery at work.





	

**Afloat**

“Yes, thank you, the senator certainly shares every one of your concerns. She’s doing all she can. She’ll be glad to know she has your support. Yes, ‘a living hell,’ you said? Got it. Thank you for the call.”

Having typed in the caller’s ZIP code, Enjolras clicks the checkboxes for Eliminate Electoral College, No Muslim Registry, Speak Out Against Hate Crimes, and nearly all the others on the side of the form that aligns with Senator Lamarque’s own stances. The office’s phones have rung nonstop this past month. The vast majority of the calls are just like this one: Make the nightmare stop.

Somehow, the overflow of support doesn’t hearten him. There’s a hollowness to it all; Lamarque’s fighting back as hard as she can, but her hardest battles take on members of her own splitting iceberg of a political party, which is too consumed in preserving the tenuous unity of the floes to question why everything’s melting in the first place.

He takes a deep breath and picks up again. Everyone’s been taking shifts on calls so that Aiden, the receptionist, can actually get a minute here and there to manage Lamarque’s preposterous schedule. She’s been darting between DC and the state capital and her family home four treacherous hours’ drive away, where her father’s precipitous decline in health makes delay impossible. Thank god for the winter recess—at least she won’t have to fly for three weeks. It’s too much to hope that she’ll relax, but maybe she’ll afford herself a little time for sleep.

“You’re doing too much,” Enjolras ventured when they spoke this morning; she’d just got on the freeway and they were brainstorming remarks for this evening, for the aftermath of yet another shitshow of a sham election. She’ll get here by early afternoon, so they’ll sit down and hammer out the details then.

“None of this will last forever,” Lamarque said. She sounded like she’d been crying; her voice, usually low and rounded, sounded rough. 

Enjolras wished, for a half a second, that her father would die now, over recess, while she has a breath of time to mourn him. Then remorse for the thought bubbled up, hot and guilty, and he pushed away the whole line of thought to ask about tonight’s talk.

The light on his phone’s flashing again. Enjolras looks down at the legal pad next to his desk as he greets another caller. “Good morning, Senator Lamarque’s office.” In the middle of the pad, heavily lined in blue ballpoint, circled and surrounded by scrawled notes—about next steps, righteous anger, organizing for change—he wrote NONE OF THIS WILL LAST. “How may I help you?” 

“Yeah, it’s Gina.” The voice sounds familiar.

“Gina?” Enjolras is confused.

“Yeah, downstairs?” Ah, of course. Gina at the desk by the elevator bay, at once welcome committee and—barring the feeble strength of the senator’s own staff—the entirety of her security detail. “You got a delivery here, but it’s not on the list.”

“I don’t think we ordered anything,” Enjolras objects. He covers the mouthpiece of the desk phone and calls out, “Anyone order delivery?” Hearing no reply from his colleagues ranged throughout the office, he picks back up. “Nope, not for us.”

Through the phone, he hears Gina relay this, gruffly, to the delivery person. “We take the senator’s safety serious,” she says pointedly. “Get on out of here.”

“Nah, sorry, it’s not even _for_ the senator,” he hears the delivery-person protest. “I just wanted—” and the voice becomes unintelligible.

A moment later, Gina’s back on. “Says he won't leave and he’s not trying to see the senator. Wants the blond guy. That’s you, right?”

“Yeah, I guess that's me.”

“Then come on down and put us all out of our misery.”

Running down the five flights of stairs, which Enjolras has calculated to save him an average of one minute over waiting for the elevator, he considers what may await him downstairs. He's been called out before. Usually it's someone who's spotted him dining with the senator and thinks he's their quickest path to her ear. Once it was someone mad about a speech the senator had given at the dedication of a family-planning center. Enjolras barely had time to register the flash of the man’s knife before the guy was twitching on the floor, Gina leaning grimly across her desk, which she’d used to steady her Taser’s aim. One time a scout troop brought cookies for the senator’s birthday. One time it was a photographer who wanted Hot Young Thinkers for a fashion spread. So, he’s not sure what to expect. 

He definitely does _not_ expect to see Gina glaring daggers at a wild-haired, bag-lugging Grantaire. 

“What are you doing here?” Enjolras asks. It’s a little unfriendly.

“Brought some coffee,” Grantaire says. “I thought it might be kind of a shit day in lib city.”

Everyone Enjolras works with drinks coffee with dinner, works into the wee hours, and staggers in in the mornings looking like they’ve been dragged there, so it is saying something that when he looks at Grantaire, his first thought is, _holy shit this guy’s exhausted._

His skin’s sallow, his hair flopped more to one side than the other, as though he’s been sailing in a strong wind, and the stark white light of the lobby casts several wrinkles into brutal clefts of shadow. He wastes no energy on greeting Enjolras; the bags hang from arms that dangle taut as ropes, but his eyes gleam. 

“He’s with me,” Enjolras says. “Thanks, Gina.”

He beckons for Grantaire to follow him past the barricade of Gina’s desk. “Come on, I’ll show you the office.”

This makes the third time he’s seen Grantaire. He went back to the coffeeshop a few weeks after the election, but Grantaire wasn’t on, and Enjolras didn’t want to ask. When he stopped in again at the start of December, he was luckier. Grantaire served him coffee in a paper cup. Enjolras, about to object, saw the grin and the wink and took the offered cup without complaint. Hard-pressed to find a spot, he finally leaned against a wall and read the message scrawled in Sharpie on the side of the cup: 

_Slammed today_

_No breaks_

_Left-hand bathroom, 9:48._

“They can’t legally deprive you of breaks just because—” Enjolras began when Grantaire crashed into the bathroom behind him, but Grantaire cut him off with his lush hot mouth and their hands were in each other’s pants and it was all so fast and brilliant and explosive, like a memory of fireworks.

Holding the door to the stairwell, Enjolras is very confused about what Grantaire’s doing at his work. 

“How much time you got?” Grantaire asks, trudging up the stairs behind him.

“Till what?”

“To get back to your job?”

“Um. However much. No one’s really keeping tabs.”

He hears a thump. He turns. Grantaire’s standing on the landing below him, watching expectantly.

“Sorry,” Enjolras really needs to get better at paying attention to people. “Let me carry those. You look—shit, I should’ve just gotten us the elevator.”

Grantaire slumps dramatically against the nearest wall. “And here I thought you’d picked the stairs for entertainment purposes.” It takes Enjolras a second too long to figure out what this means, then his heart lurches. Grantaire tugs at the zipper of his puffy rust-colored down jacket, uncovering a remarkably fresh-looking print cotton button-down. “People use ’em much?”

Grantaire’s just standing there, half a flight down, looking wrung-out and very much fully dressed despite the unzipping of outerwear, so Enjolras really shouldn’t be feeling so turned-on, should he?

If he were to analyze himself a little more, which he’ll do later, certainly, he’d find something less straightforward than arousal—a piquant yearning and sympathy and wretchedness and perhaps even, below the surface, a tiny sting of scorn, all of which add up to a complex mess of feelings that tangle in Enjolras’s gut and send the blood rushing to his face and his dick.

“They’re all monitored,” he chokes out, glad to have remembered.

Grantaire glances up the underside of the next flight to the camera bubble in the ceiling. He nods, giving nothing away, droops to pick up his bags again, and carries on up to Enjolras. Enjolras insists on carrying the bags the remainder of the way. They’re heavy. Grantaire seems slightly more animated walking beside him; at one point, his knuckles brush Enjolras’s, and Enjolras happens to stumble. 

At the fourth-floor landing, Grantaire tugs Enjolras suddenly aside. He’s pointing at a little nondescript door beside the broad doors to the fourth floor and the entrance to the top deck of the garage. A custodian’s closet, door ajar.

Enjolras looks at Grantaire. The video will record them going in and coming out. Anyone who might see will know.

“Please,” Grantaire says. It’s at once an invitation and a command and a plea. Enjolras feels a wonderful swelling in his chest.

The closet is small, half the floor space already consumed by a rolling mop-bucket and several industrial-sized bottles of cleaning solution. When Enjolras closes the door behind them, hearing it latch with a satisfying click—and since through some egregious oversight no one thought to install a lock inside this custodial closet, that click will have to do—it’s dark inside. Enjolras reaches in the dark and finds Grantaire’s body, now divested of its down jacket, and hauls him close.

Grantaire wraps his arms around Enjolras, and just holds him.

Apparently being forced to confront his feelings more closely right now, sooner than he’d planned, Enjolras holds Grantaire and all those demanding emotions needle at him and he admits them entry and holds tighter and shudders with the goodness of holding and being held.

Grantaire presses his forehead to Enjolras’s forehead and his junk to Enjolras’s junk and shudders back. 

“It’s so much,” Enjolras says in inept approximation.

Grantaire kisses him. Enjolras kisses back and holds tighter, and sure, he felt Grantaire’s hard-on against him a minute ago, but now he feels it like the first summer sunshine on exposed skin, hot and comforting and miles-deep with promise.

There’s nothing lazy in their kissing, but it’s not rushed. It’s kissing for kissing’s sake, except with their whole bodies, their hands running over each other as lips and tongues meet, Enjolras’s wool trousers sliding against Grantaire’s snug jeans.

In the dark, each heartbeat of this is a small forever, crammed with simple sensations of warmth and pleasure and a thousand metaphysical aches and wants, doubts, fears.

“Fuck me,” he says without meaning to. “I want you to fuck me.” Grantaire is making out with his neck; when Enjolras says this, he moans. “Or whatever.”

“Can’t right now,” Grantaire says.

“No, in a home. A place we don’t have to leave. A place that’s not—”

“God, I’m gonna come,” Grantaire grunts.

“Oh shit.” Combined with all this marvelous, measured friction, voicing the idea of fucking Grantaire has brought Enjolras startlingly close too. He fumbles for the buttons of Grantaire’s jeans, but Grantaire presses harder against him.

“I don’t mind. I just wanna get off with you. You close?” 

It’s exquisitely uncomfortable, Grantaire’s hard cock and button-fly grinding against him, and it’s also pushing him to the edge.

Enjolras lets his hands depart that perfect ass and locks them behind Grantaire’s curly head so that he can hold him still enough to kiss, deep and smooth and slow, as the tremors take them both over.

 _Fuck_ , Enjolras thinks minutes later, as they still cling to each other in a sunken lean against the wall. _I need more holding_.

“I dunno about it,” Grantaire says suddenly, as if continuing a conversation. “I’m a real shitty sleeper.” 

“I tend to run on five hours or so,” Enjolras murmurs back. “But I’ve had less. I’ll deal.”

They separate just enough for Enjolras to text Grantaire. The dim light of his phone makes Grantaire’s eyes huge and questioning.

Even recalling the national horror show that awaits him in the office, Enjolras can’t remember the last time he felt such a deep stirring of emotion. 

“Yeah,” he says. “Here’s my address. I live alone. Come any time.” He dares add, “Come tonight.”

Grantaire looks tempted.

“Please,” Enjolras says, and pulls him in for another kiss. 

When they finally push open the door to the little room, having calmed their breathing and cleaned up a bit with some paper towels from the shelf and shoved spare flaps of fabric and hair back into the approximately right positions, Grantaire looks, shockingly, more composed than upon arrival. Enjolras is under no illusions that anyone could say the same of him.

Unfortunately, their entry back onto the landing seems to come seconds after that of the senator from the parking garage, who turns at the sudden noise of the door shifting open to see her speechwriter and a mopheaded man in a puffy jacket emerge from a closet, cheeks bright and clothes rumpled, lugging large canvas bags.

There’s a long moment of quiet as Senator Lamarque surveys the two men. Lately her face has seemed creased with worry; it’s only when she begins to chuckle now, looking between them, that Enjolras remembers she even knows how to. 

“Maxine Lamarque,” she says, gesturing lightly to her chest. “Since my speechwriter seems disinclined, for once, to provide the necessary words.”

Face aflame, Enjolras starts to say, “This is Grantaire,” but Grantaire’s pulling a carafe from one of the bags.

“The coffee guy. Thinking about setting up here. You got a cup?”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I may keep writing bits of this in association with pivotally shitty days in US politics, so feel free to subscribe to [the series](http://archiveofourown.org/series/610273) if you, like me, find some small consolation in the potential of sex, closeness, and—dare I suggest?— _love_ , even in devastation.


End file.
